It seemed, as he stood waiting, that the dust of the pulverized mountains had settled over everything in the office save the granite-like 43 figure that sat at the desk, rereading the letter which had changed all his life. For the first time he thought that perhaps he should not have so easily displayed that link with his past. It seemed a useless sacrilege. If the mine-owner was not reading the letter, he was pondering, unmoved, over a course of action, and took his time.
Dick thought bitterly, in a flash, of all that it represented. The quarrel with his father on that day he had returned from Columbia University with a mining course proudly finished, when each, stubborn by nature, had insisted that his plan was the better; of his rebellious refusal to enter the brokerage office in Wall Street, and declaration that he intended to go into the far West and follow his profession, and of the stern old man’s dismissal when he asserted, with heat:
“You’ve always taken the road you wanted to go since your mother died. I objected to your taking up mining engineering, but you went ahead in spite of me. I tried to get you to take an interest in the business that has been my life work, but you scorned it. You wouldn’t be a broker, or a banker. You had to be a mining engineer! All right, you’ve had your way, so far. Now, you can keep on in the way you have selected. I’ll give you five thousand dollars, but you’ll never 44 get another cent from me until you’ve learned what a fool you’re making of yourself, and return to do what I want you to do. It won’t be long! There’s a vast difference between dawdling around a university learning something that is going to be useless while your father pays the bills, and turning that foolish education into dollars to stave off an empty belly. You can go now.”
In those days the house of Phillip Townsend had been a great name in New York. Now this was all that was left of it. Dissolution, death, and dust, and a half-interest in an abandoned mine! The harsh voice of Bully Presby aroused him from his thoughts.
“All right,” it said. “This seems sufficient, but if you’ve got the sense and judgment Sloan seems to think you have, you’ll come to the conclusion that there’s not much use in wasting any of his good, hard dollars on the Croix d’Or. It never has paid. It never will pay. I offered to buy it once, but I wouldn’t give a dollar for it now, beyond what the timber above ground is worth. It owns a full section of timberland, and that’s about all.”
He reached for a pen and wrote a note to the watchman, telling him that the bearer, Richard 45 Townsend, had come to look over the property and that his orders must be accepted, and signed it with his hard-driven scrawl. He handed it up to Dick without rising from his seat, and said: “That’ll fix you up, I think.”
As if by an afterthought, he asked: “Have you any idea of the condition of the mine?”
“No,” Dick answered, as he folded the letter and put it into his pocket, together with the one from his late father’s partner.
“Well, then, I can tell you, it’s bad,” said Presby, fixing him with his cool, hard stare. “The Cross is spotted. Once in a while they had pay chutes. They never had a true ledge. There isn’t one there, as far as anybody that ever worked it knows. They wasted five hundred thousand dollars trying to find it, and drove ten thousand feet of drifts and tunnels. They went down more than six hundred feet. She’s under water, no one knows how deep. It might take twenty thousand to un-water the sinking shaft again, and at the bottom you’d find nothing. Take my advice. Let it alone. Good-day.”
Dick walked out, scarcely knowing whether to feel grateful for the churlish advice or to resume his wonted attitude of self-reliance and hold himself unprejudiced by Presby’s condemnation 46 of the Croix d’Or. He wondered if Bully Presby suspected him of having been friendly with the mob of drunken ruffians at the road house, but he had been given no chance to explain.